Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
by AntipodeanOpaleye
Summary: For all their talking, it's only ever really about one thing. Following directly after IM2, the conversations of Tony Stark and Pepper Potts. Spoilers for Iron Man 2. Conversation Three: An Element of Depth.
1. Conversation One: Breakfast, The Morning

**Title:** Thirteen Conversations (About One Thing)

**Rating:** PG -13

**Disclaimer:** Everything you recognize from any other source either doesn't belong to me or is a purely coincidental occurrence. Anything that you've never seen likely belongs to me. I write for enjoyment and no copyright infringement is intended. Title belongs to Karen and Jill Sprecher, from the film of the same name.

**Author's Notes: **In a nutshell: this is an unabashed, unapologetic, schmoopy fluff-fest. Mostly me just indulging a number of the juicy bits of romantic(ish) conversation that could have happened after the end of the film, with a touch of style-experimentation, in the hopes that just maybe, some of you might enjoy them as well.

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**Thirteen Conversations (About One Thing)**

_Conversation One: Breakfast, The Morning After_

She wakes in the morning, just as the sun is breaking -- glistening on the water that stretches wide outside the windows: fire reflected in the glass. She stretches -- stiff; realizes that she's still fully dressed, and it doesn't take long for the haze of sleep to begin to clear, to lift and burn away until she remembers: the smoke and the scent of searing, the way it still clings to her shoulders, the collar of her dress alongside the musk of evening, of the lingering cold above the skyline -- the rush of flying that made her want to laugh, just as nausea plunged in the pit of her stomach.

If she tries, focuses; licks her lips with thought, she can catch the way he tasted: spiced, almost metallic; the way he smacked of watercress and... coconut. It was definitely coconut.

She sits up slow, breathes deep as she straightens; she's in a guest room, the one she's stayed in from time to time, when she's too tired to drive, or Tony's talked her into a nightcap of some vintage worth half her yearly salary; when the arm of the sofa isn't the last thing she sees before sleep takes her. She's claimed the space, in her own way; all of her very favorite pieces from Tony's collection are arranged on the walls, splotches of color and shade against the open glass, overlooking the breaking waves; she hadn't though much of it, but he'd kept the art -- the ones she loved; none of those had been given away.

She wonders, for a moment, if she's reading too much into it; but it's Tony Stark, and if any man is made of subtlety and layers beneath all of the bravado and the snark -- by god, it's him.

Her steps are quiet, a soft hush against the floor without her heels, and it's not until she's down the stairs and halfway into the dining area that he sees her, notices her, and she can feel his gaze following the trails of wrinkles and creases in clothes; feel something like longing tugging at the skin beneath.

When he lifts his hand to his mouth, sucks something -- the hints of whatever she can smell cooking, lingering sweet on the air, stronger as she gets closer -- off his knuckle with quick, thoughtless force, lips full and red as he licks the sticky residue away from the skin; when he grins at her around the finger between his teeth -- when the pop of it leaving his mouth smacks hard, almost seems to echo -- she wonders, briefly, what the hell they'd been waiting for; what took them so long.

"Morning, sunshine," he greets her, voice a little rough, eyes a little dark, and how in the world had she failed to notice the way he'd been slipping, the way his skin had lost its color, the way the bruises sunk deeper, darker on his flesh? Because seeing him, the hunter green of his grease-marked polo pulling out the lingering sallowness, the deep tissue damage in olive-tones, the sleepless half-circles beneath his eyes; suddenly, it's all very clear where it was muted, vague before -- though it shouldn't have been. It's obvious, now: the touch of stress, the toll it had taken on him as he suffered in silence for so long, too long; even as she can see the way the color's coming back, the thickness of his skin, the glow -- it's unmistakable.

She follows him as he approaches the table, and tries not dwell on why she hadn't noticed, why she hadn't let herself notice; the whys make her feel dizzy, and she's not ready for them yet.

He slides a plate across the tabletop to settle in front of the chair she's standing behind, that's holding her steady. "Most important meal of the day," he notes airily; she stares at the stack of pancakes -- a little lopsided, cut at strange angles, none of them quite circular -- swimming in a pool of syrup and topped with enough whipped cream to make her wonder why, exactly, he has quite so much of it on hand.

With a start, she realizes that a week ago, she wouldn't have wanted to know; now, she kind of wishes she did. Wishes she had the intimate knowledge herself as to why, exactly, Tony possessed enough of the stuff on hand to transform her pile of flapjacks into a mountain of snow.

The heat at her center surges for a moment at the thoughts, the images that come to mind, and she coughs to cover a gasp; he doesn't notice the slip as she pulls out the chair and sits, crosses her legs above the knee: too high, too tight.

"And look," he adds, more to break the silence, to smooth whatever is making this different -- like it's illusive, like they don't know what's changed. "No berries. No berries of any kind," and indeed, they are completely berry-free, her pancakes -- made from scratch, she can tell, with two hands that could figure anything out; the scent of burnt batter that lingers under the saccharine of syrup and cream betrays the effort he tries to hide in the casual set of his shoulders, the way he leans, almost sprawls in the chair opposite her. "Better safe than sorry."

"Hmmm, caution," she comments idly as she knives off the corner of the oddly-triangular pancake at the top of her stack, playing into his attempt at cutting through the tension; she's known him long enough to understand what he's trying to do, what he wants. "Restraint. How very unlike you." She smiles a little as his brows angle, just a tad; he raises a halting finger at her, rising and retreating into the kitchen again, and in his absence she does her best to be discreet about pushing the bulk of the whipped cream into the syrup that's soaking the bottom cake, watching it mingle and dissolve, hoping he doesn't notice when he sits back down.

She feels him approach from behind her, and it sends a thrill down her spine, the warmth and the weight of his presence at her back, the way the inside of his arm brushes her shoulder as he reaches around her and place a glass of orange juice at the top of her plate. "Aren't you having any?" she asks, craning her neck to meet his eyes.

He shrugs, avoiding her gaze, and something in her tightens when her murmurs; "M'not hungry."

"Did you already eat?"

His gaze is level, hooded, and he barely skims the her line of sight when he speaks: "Haven't had much of an appetite, lately."

And without warning, she can feel the heat, the hints of pleasure and promise start to drain away, replaced with cold, with shame.

"Because of..." she trails off, and she doesn't need to say anything more, nor does he -- the way he fingers at the dulled-glow of the reactor beneath his shirt, drumming at the center and circling idly round the edges; it's all the answer she needs.

After the everything, he'd wanted to get home, run further diagnostics on the new implant; on the flight home they'd talked for a while, brief little snippets of conversation as the jet sped back west through the night -- they'd both dozed between stilted words and awkward half-explanations about palladium and blood poisoning; but when he'd fallen asleep in his chair, just across from her, the deep 'v' of his undershirt had shifted, revealed the lines he hadn't meant for her to see -- smoky grids etched into him, centering at his chest, drawn against his heart; and in that instant, with certainty and the hollow weight of almost and so close bearing down upon her, she understood the gravity of what had nearly happened.

She'd almost lost him; and she'd have never gotten the chance to say goodbye.

The tears had been unavoidable, and if she'd broken down, if she'd stretched her feet out over the space between them, her ankles brushing the arm of his chair until she could feel the cadence, the heat of his breath as he slept against window -- well, it couldn't have been helped; in truth, she figures, it had been a long time in coming. And while the details were still fuzzy, the basic outline was all she needed, all she required to know that there was really only one question she had left to ask.

"Would you have told me?" her voice cracks, almost fades into nothing; if any sound save both their breaths had existed in that moment, her words would have been lost.

He doesn't reply, not at first; stares past her, at a point that doesn't exist and isn't her -- could never be her -- and that hurts, if she's honest. She understands it, but it hurts.

"Not if I could've helped it," he finally answers, and she bites her lip as the truth she'd feared suddenly becomes the truth she can't deny, thick and heavy, suffocating. She turns away, opposite from where he looks beyond her, as if it'll help, like it would create distance -- make it hurt a little less.

"But Pepper?" The feel of his hand draped, splayed over hers cracks something in her; it's a tender kind of touch, one she'd never bothered to image coming from him, and in that moment, she knows she should have. She should have bothered to imagine it.

It kills her, to think that it had taken so little to shake her faith in him.

"I don't think I could have helped it for much longer."

And while she stares, stone-faced for the longest time, still and sure as she looks into him and reads the things he doesn't want her to see, but that he can't keep from her -- won't keep from her, not anymore -- she starts to crumble inside. And she knows the sharp hiss, the way she inhales quick through her teeth against the sting in her chest, the pain that resonates in her lungs as the air hits -- she knows that it burns in him too, and not just from the way that he flinches a little, the corners of his eyes drawn up in creases at the sound.

Because to hear him say it; admit to it -- good god, but he must have been half-dead already.

"Damnit, Tony," she curses, hard; but her voice wavers, and any venom, anything left of the bitterness, the hurt seeps away prematurely, until all she has left is the terror, the seizing at the center her chest that trembled when he'd said the words -- dying, for pity's sake; he'd been dying -- and she realizes that even with the drones, and the explosions, the death and destruction and the flying and the falling and the kiss; and his metal clad hands on her arms, replaced by the roughness, the dry lines of his skin; she realizes, suddenly, that the tremor in her chest was still there, still strong: the culmination of all the wondering, the worrying, all the things she'd brushed aside because she'd been preoccupied, too busy, too careless -- because the possibilities had made her stomach clench and her heart race and she couldn't do it anymore.

And then she thinks about it, the things she'd been trying like hell to keep in the back corners, the dark places of her mind: thinks about finding him, cold on the floor of his workshop; about the cool, calculating tone of Jarvis calling her cell and telling her, calmly and without emotion, that he'd lost a read on Mr. Stark's vitals, that emergency medical services had already been contacted, and would she please make haste in returning to the mansion. She thinks of him alone, thinks of the last thing he'd ever see being lights and metal -- nothing warm, nothing that cared, that felt...

She closes her eyes and tries to breathe through the lump, the pull in her throat as she sees, burned behind her eyes by nightmares and guilt, the flickering of his arc implant on that rooftop: ice-blue blinking, shivering in and out of existence -- the way his heart had followed suit beneath her touch when she'd found him, fluttering wildly and faint; she sees it as it goes out, fades to black forever, and if she manages to stifle a sob, it would be a miracle; if she fails, she doesn't notice.

"I'm sorry," he murmurs, brings her back to the present where he's at her side, watching her, alive, though it had been a close thing. The words are like a rumble, a hum, and when he strokes his thumb across her the curve of her wrist, she knows he has to catch her pulse, the rhythm of it; the massage of his touch, though, is steady, and she tries to focus on it, tries to anchor herself to it without giving in to the fear so that she has a touchstone, something to fall back on when she looks up and finally meets his eyes: sharp, wide and honest like she's never seen them before.

"Your breakfast is getting cold." He scoots his chair closer to her, until his knee bumps up against hers, his thigh just a breath from her own. He grabs for her fork, uses the side to saw off a slice of that bottom, syrup-doused pancake before he skewers it, lifts it to his mouth with delicate, careful purpose -- proving something that she reads, that she knows; that lets the lead, the cold in her chest dissipate, just a little. "Mmm, still good. But cold."

"I should have noticed," she interrupts suddenly, the words seeming to spring forth from her and catch in the air, in his throat as he swallows hard around the bite of food. "You were quiet, you weren't eating..." she gestures at the plate, the prongs of the fork he's drawing from his mouth, her voice pitched higher, growing just a little bit hysterical as it all piles on top of itself, as it finally adds up and starts to make terrible, horrifying, utterly perfect sense. "You smelled like plants, and half the time it takes bribery to get you to finish a salad," she adds, and he grins a little, the expression oddly, painfully haunted as his eyes flicker between her and her glass of juice. "You sold the..." and her voice abandons her, and she knows if she goes much farther she'll burst into tears; that the pressure at the base of her throat -- throbbing and sore -- will erupt, escape, and she'll have no recourse. "And the suit..."

The signs; so many signs -- and she'd missed every one of them. Overlooked them. Wrote them off. The man, the person she knew best in the entire world; he'd been dying and she hadn't even noticed.

What kind of person did that make her?

Before she can stop them, reign them in, tears start well at the corners of her eyes; she shuts them, blinks hard against it, breathes deep until her heartbeats feel separate again -- quick but distinct -- instead of a single, endless, frantic hum.

"I should have known," she finally forces through the clench of her jaw, emotion thick in her tone, and he's quiet for a moment, until she opens her eyes and meets his gaze; and she can see the gentleness, the warmth -- the way his heart comes up and fills his eyes just a little, just enough. She can see him take pity on her, on the guilt that's swallowing her whole, and she doesn't deserve it, not now; but that doesn't matter -- nothing matters, except the way he reaches out to rest his palm at the back of her neck, threading his fingers in the hair at the base of her skull and drawing her close, breathing against her cheek.

"I should have known that, of all the things in the world, you were allergic to strawberries," he counters plainly, the words calm and steady, sure; so much more than just themselves. And it's enough.

He draws back after a moment, the hand on her neck moving to slide soft across her jaw, cupping her cheek as he reaches over and grabs her fork again, stabs at another hunk of cold pancake and offers it to her -- and somehow, whatever else the gesture could be, it's only endearing. Only tender and unsure.

She leans in and takes the proffered bite between her teeth, and the smile he gives her makes it taste all the sweeter.

"They were delicious, by the way," he says softly as she chews, swallows; but there's a light in his eyes: something like hope and fear and all of the maybes that he'd never quite learned to let go of. "The strawberries. Probably the best I've ever had."

She laughs, and whatever was broken -- it starts to feel fixed.

"Maybe..." she starts after a pause, after his touch is gone; tentative for the first time in his presence since the first week she'd spent in his employ, hesitant because she's failed him, somehow -- and sure, they've failed each other over the years, but this is different. He could have died.

She takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and lays her hand over his this time, keeps him close, and safe, and makes a silent promise that this -- whatever it is they're doing, building, making between them two of them; whatever this is, she's not going to fail him again.

Because she can read it in his eyes: he's trying like hell not to fail her.

"Maybe once all this blows over, once we fix everything," and she sees it, the little glimmer, the flicker of life in him that sparks when she says 'we,' and she smiles softly over at him, lets the curve of her lips untangle the nerves, the strain in coiled tight in his bones. "Maybe then, Venice."

"Yeah," his answer comes after a beat, a breath; and finally -- finally -- he sounds like himself. "Yeah, Venice."

She finishes her pancakes -- soggy and too sweet -- but it's not such a burden; more like a joy.


	2.  Conversation Two: Deflect and Absorb

**Title:** Thirteen Conversations (About One Thing)

**Rating:** PG -13

**Disclaimer:** Everything you recognize from any other source either doesn't belong to me or is a purely coincidental occurrence. Anything that you've never seen likely belongs to me. I write for enjoyment and no copyright infringement is intended. Title belongs to Karen and Jill Sprecher, from the film of the same name.

**Author's Notes: **Fluff, banter, and oh, hey there UST; there's a nice bit of you in this part. It's been a while since I wrote Tony and Pepper bickering back and forth as they do, and the rust shows -- however, I do think I'm getting back into the swing of their dynamic a bit, so at least that's a good thing.

Also, this part was done much quicker, and ended up rather longer, than I'd anticipated. I attribute that to all of you lovely people being so supportive of the first bit -- thank you so much, each and every one of you :)

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**Thirteen Conversations (About One Thing)**

_Conversation Two: Deflect and Absorb_

She casts a glance around her otherwise unoccupied office, allowing herself to slump just a little in her chair, the late afternoon sun streaming through the windows at her back. She cranes her neck indulgently over the headrest, squinting as the rays catch her eyes, and she breathes slow; deep -- keeps her eyes closed.

If she couldn't _see_ the mountains of work littering her desk, perhaps then they really _didn't_ exist; object permanence can go to hell, for all she's concerned.

She starts suddenly as the abrasive shriek of an unpersonalized default ringtone echos through the room -- she'd only just gotten her new Blackberry that morning, after her old one had been lost to fire and chaos earlier in the week; she doesn't bother looking at the screen before she answers, having yet to import her contacts.

"Potts."

"Mmm," comes the purr from the other end, and she cradles the handset a little closer against her ear as she lets her head loll backwards again, his voice more easing than anything she's heard all day, and it's a new phenomenon, in a sense; then again, it's not new at all. "You've got that powerful, CEO phone voice down pat," he informs her, just a little huskily, and her neck stretches further as she tilts back in the chair a bit; she tries not to image, to envision the feel of his mouth on her throat; "It's sexy as hell."

"You're ridiculous." She stifles a bit of a laugh, but even she can hear the smile in her own voice; knows he does, too, as he banters back with clear amusement:

"It's served me well thus far."

She sucks in a long, leisurely breath, the stretch of her chest tugging against the pull of her suit, given her angle, so she sits up carefully, straightens herself and runs taming fingers along the top of her hair, smoothing the frays; wondering idly if he's got Jarvis streaming the surveillance footage from the feed she knows is set into the crease of the ceiling panel in the left corner.

"I don't answer the phone any differently than I ever did," she half-protests, without any real investment, any real force.

A knowing "Au contraire, ma cheri," is all she gets in reply, and he doesn't know it -- not yet -- but it turns her on like _mad_ when he speaks French. "So, what are you wearing?"

She heaves a long-suffering sigh; that, she supposes, was to be expected. "Was there something you wanted, Mr. Stark?" she asks with just enough terseness that it's mildly chiding.

"Obviously. I wanted to know what you were wearing."

"I have a meeting in exactly two minutes," and it's more like twenty minutes, but he doesn't need to know that; she'd have never lasted as long as she has in his employ if she'd been honest to a fault with a man like him -- nothing would _ever_ have gotten done. "If this conversation isn't finished within that timeframe, I'm hanging up on you."

"I'm getting dinner," he answers with equal brevity; "what do you want?"

She chooses not to dwell on the way he assumes, the way he takes for granted that they'll take their dinner together, that she's not otherwise engaged for the evening. She's not, of course; and it's not an issue, really -- she just doesn't have the energy at the moment to linger on what it does or doesn't mean; what changes, shifts between them it betrays.

Her eyes trail instead over the veritable mountain of things that require her signature, her approval, her comments; all of which she should, ideally, have at least perused before she leaves for the evening. "I have a stack of work about three miles high on my desk right now, Tony,"

"You're resigning, remember? Not your work anymore."

She smirks, because that's _classic_ Tony; and sometimes, when he's changed so much, it's refreshing to see that some things about him are still as endearingly infuriating as ever. "I don't think that's how it works."

"Of course that's how it works. It's somebody else's problem."

"Oh, so I can bring it home to you, Mister Returning CEO?"

"Alright, see, _that's_ not how it works," he counters, and she can hear the note of defense, of retreat in his tone; can't help but feel a little bit smug at causing it. "Deflect and absorb, Potts; have I taught you nothing about shirking responsibility?" She hears some nondescript rustling in the background, and the distinct sound of one of his bots whirring. "Besides, doesn't Ms. Romanoff-"

"Despite all your indications, personally, to the contrary, you _do_ realize that the whole point of having an alias is to _maintain_ one's cover, not to blow it, right?" she asks, gaze scanning the piles of papers lined in front of her as she remembers the very finance paperwork that said undercover assistant had left for her that morning.

The irritated clip of Tony's words as he replies fills her with more twisted gratification than it likely should: "Doesn't Ms. _Rushman_ know how to forge your signature yet? I mean, hell, _you'd_ mastered _that_ essential skill by the end of your first week."

And it had only taken _that_ long because he had that infuriating hitch when he wrote his his r's in script.

"Natalie's already left for the day," Pepper notes off-handedly as she shuffles stacks for the requisition form; "she had a previous engagement."

"You let her have _plans_?" And stars _above_, but he honestly sounds a little bit _scandalized_ at the mere _possibility_.

"Shocking as it may be," she shoots back, deadpan; "unlike _some_ people, I treat my personal assistants as human beings."

"As opposed to?"

She almost wishes that he _is_ watching her, just so he can see the smirk that curls her lips almost dangerously, the sharp glint she knows he could read in her eyes, even across a security feed. "Oh, I'd liken it to indentured servitude," she quotes back to him, with every bit of snideness he'd mustered for Washington: "Or prostitution."

She can hear the way he pauses; only _hopes_ he's a bit taken aback by the jibe -- she'd be _waiting_ for the perfect opportunity to take that comment and toss it back at him.

"I was _not_ that bad."

"Trust me," Pepper quips as she uncaps a pen with her teeth, having located the papers she'd wanted, "you were. And you still are."

"You wound me," he replies, in that voice he gets when he's a little bit insulted, but a little too full of himself to ever take seriously the slight. "You've officially lost your vote regarding meal choices, on account of that comment. I'm getting Thai." The roll and slam of a shutting drawer in the background travels muffled over the connection. "Do you want your regular?"

"My regular?" she asks, genuinely curious as she skims the last lines of the proposition and affixes her signature at the appropriate lines; she has her preferences, certainly -- no strawberries, light on the oil, and absolutely _nothing_ labeled with more than four chiles on a scale of spiciness -- but she wasn't aware that she had a _regular_ order much of anywhere.

"You'll be wanting..." she hears the soft scape of opening drawers, the rush of paper again paper, "green curry. With chicken."

"And you've deduced this how?"

"Because you always get curry from the Thai place, and you cycle through them like a traffic light. You got red curry last time. You're back up to green, now."

And he says it with such certainty, like its common knowledge that she follows this pattern that she hadn't even noticed; but the more she thinks about it, the more she's pretty sure that he's right. Besides; when it comes to the details of life, Tony Stark rarely misses a beat. It's just the obvious things he sometimes neglects to notice.

It's new though, that his attention seems to focused on her; but then, of course, it's not new at all: he's noticed a _trend_ over _time_ -- and in that instant, it's clear that the fact that he'd been paying attention to _her_, for so long, is important somehow.

But she really _does_ have a meeting, and she can't afford to dwell on the deeper significance laden in her unconscious curry preferences.

"Right," she finally replies, her lips quirking again as she slides her bottom lip between her teeth and, remembering suddenly that she hadn't eaten lunch, indulges a quick yearning for the green chiles over rice awaiting her once the day finally draws to a close.

"Of course I'm right. And Pepper?"

"Hmm?"

"If you're not here by seven," he tells her firmly, with an edge of slyness that never, _never_ bodes well for anyone by him; "I'll have to come and get you myself."

"Empty threats, Tony," she reminds him as she starts to pile the portfolios she needs to take with her to meet with the appropriations committee. "Your cars are in storage until the renovation's done."

"Which means there's only one mode of transportation left that I'll be using to _pick you up_."

There's an emphasis, a verbal underscoring of those last three words that make it very clear just _how_ he intends to pick her up -- and _fly her away_ -- should she keep him waiting.

"Don't be late," he nearly sings through the phone before he disconnects them.

Pepper looks at the clock on her desktop; five more minutes until her meeting at five o'clock.

She supposes she'll have to let them know it'll be a brief one; there's no way in _hell_ she's getting herself whisked through the air twice in one week, let alone when her life was _not_ in immediate danger.

And while maybe, just _maybe_ he's not serious about the suit; he's Tony Stark, and odds are, he was.

* * *

She's barely settled herself on her favorite settee in one of the small rooms off the main kitchen, having just taken her hair down when she hears Jarvis greeting his master dutifully upon his return. She follows the sound of Tony's footsteps up the stairs, and it doesn't take him long to find her, the hint of metal and fumes masking that musky scent of man that always clung around him after a mission -- like testosterone condensed and mixed with sweat and blood and dirt.

"Do not tell me you _actually_ took the suit to pick up takeout," she turns from unbuckling the straps of her Manolos to see if he's wearing his neoprene suit, but finds him instead in a faded pair of jeans and a simple -- thick -- black tee, complete with his favorite jacket, tattered at the seams but sturdy; solid.

"The _cars_ are in storage," he answers with a cheeky sort of grin, and she can't help but appreciate the way that aged leather he loves so much clings to him, molds to his frame. "The _bikes_ are still here."

She turns back around, expecting him to sit down next to her, or at least across from her, as she catches a whiff of their food nearby. She waits in vain, however, as he pauses, stops behind her, hovering over the crown of her head for a moment before smoothing his palms over the wavy mass of her hair, the crook of his thumb catching the bulk of it as he runs his hands down the lengths. He twists it gently up, piling it atop her head before letting it cascade, almost cool against her skin. He sweeps it away once more, hooks it to the side across her shoulder and out of his way as the tips of his fingers start to dig unexpectedly against her muscles.

"Christ, you're tense," he lets out with a low sort of whistle, his palms pressing hard, firm into the knots wound tight through her neck and shoulders; forceful, determined -- he wouldn't break her, and he knew it -- but still subtle, still careful. Caring. Relaxing into the touch, she had to admit: she liked it. "Tough day?"

"Half of Flushing Meadows is still littered with debris," she mutters in answer, still overwhelmed by the scope of it all, the reality of it; of _everything_; "Cleanup's been a disaster, not to mention that Hammer Industries has been an absolute thorn in my side about anything and everything. Can you believe they tried to imply that _we_ had somehow orchestrated that entire disaster to send a message to their, their," and she's stammering, and he's not helping with that grin she can _feel_ him giving her as she does; "that, _boneheaded_ CEO of theirs!"

"Boneheaded," Tony laughs, and the warmth of his breath skates against the base of her neck as he rests just the tip of his chin between her shoulder blades, forehead balanced at the curve of her skull as he massages down the line of her spine. "How unabashedly _insulting_, Miss Potts."

She pulls far enough away from his attentive hands to shoot him a glare, but she misses the soothing touch too much to keep it up for long.

"I haven't even touched the transition," she continues, arching unconsciously into the way he kneads against her vertebrae, "though Natalie assures me she's getting the ball rolling to sign the company back over to you."

"There's no hurry on that," he murmurs as his thumbs trace hard lines against the bones of her back; "I trust you not to run things into the ground." Unexpectedly, and without a word, he reaches up to her shoulders and slides his hands below her jacket, pushing it swiftly from her arms until it pools around her elbows, slips to the small of her back.

"Besides," he adds, as his hands get dangerously close to being indecently proximate to the swell of her hips, the curve below her tailbone; and the fact that he's flirting with said line, but not crossing it, is dangerous enough in itself; "I distinctly recall you telling me you'd never ask me to sign over my company again."

She only half hears the words, in truth; almost wants to tense, to address the implications of the extent, the unwavering focus he's devoting to touching her, massaging the expanse of her back, but the truth remains that his touch is a little bit heavenly, easing the stress, the tautness and the anxiety from her frame a little more with every brush of his skin against the silky fabric of her shirt.

"How naïve of me," she murmurs after a beat, her head lolling a little to the side as he comes back up to work at her shoulders, her neck, fingertips playing at her collar. "Little did I know that the job you've so skillfully neglected to do all these years was more work than I'm cut out for." She pauses, stifles a little groan as he finds a particularly well-formed knot just at her collarbone. "And really," she tries to sound reprimanding, barely manages perturbed; "how anything short of nuclear _war_ could be stressful after cleaning up _your_ messes for so long is beyond my comprehension."

"What can I say?" he answers her with the lengths of his hands -- the hard lines drawn down the sides, from his fingers to the top of his wrists -- sliding a languid tattoo, a rhythm along either side of her spine; "I know how to pick my battles." His ministrations blossom outward to either side, blissfully, playing across her ribs and rolling along the protrusions of bone through the skin, the thin fabric of her button-up. "Running things, taking care of business... that was always something that Ob-" and his hands stop before the name can get past his lips; she tenses, undos half of his work in a moment -- she doesn't know if that particular sore spot will ever really heal.

"That..." he recovers, after a second that lingers too long, his hands slowly restarting at the peaks of her shoulders, moving lower at with less levity, less passion; more distraction now than before; "other people were better at."

She lets out a long breath, tries to change the direction of their conversation; "So it had nothing to do with you being more interested in... other things?"

"I didn't say that," he answers, a little wistful as he drums his knuckles in the dips of her back as he liltingly works upward again. "I just never took the time to really learn _how_ to be that person. The straight-laced executive in the leather chair at the head of the long conferencey... table thingy."

"Conferencey table _thingy_," Pepper repeats, a little disbelieving, as the heels of Tony's palms rest between her shoulder and her neck on either side, fingers stretching, splaying outward toward her clavicles, his touch sealed against her skin save for the gaps of his knuckles where they raise off of her. She can feel her pulse jump, the tension growing in her now of a different breed than the kind he's been diligently coaxing out of her.

"Yeah, you know," he picks up idly, undeterred -- casual, even, as his touch begins to inch toward the bare 'v' of her skin between the buttons she'd undone on her drive back from the office, hadn't thought to refasten; is glad, now, that she didn't; "the big one. With the big stuffy chairs in that hideous buff color."

She giggles at that; she's never actually _seen_ those buff colored chairs with her own two eyes -- they were far before her time -- but she's seen pictures. The executive board rooms haven't been done up in that kind of decor since Howard's time.

If she'd ever wondered when Tony'd last attended a legitimate, _actual_ board meeting, she now had her answer.

"You don't believe me," he accuses lightly, if a bit petulant, once her bark of laughter dies. He buries his face into her neck, just a tad sulkily, and she shakes her head; whether that's to say she doesn't believe him, or that she doesn't _not_ believe him, though, even she isn't sure; his breath on her skin is too distracting to think about anything else.

"The idea that Tony Stark never learned how to properly be in charge is a little bit fantastic, you have to admit."

The pout of his lips softens, starts to reverse; she can feel his mouth move against the crook of her neck and it's unexpectedly intimate, to feel the first hints of his smile without seeing them.

"It's true," he assures her, and she fights a shudder at the way his lip grazes wet on her skin: too fleeting to be intentional, but she's hard-pressed to call it an accident. "though, you know, I'd..."

She thinks his breath catches, but in the same moment so does hers, and she can't tell them apart anymore, even if she wanted to; in truth, it doesn't really matter. "I'd be willing to try and learn, you know," he murmurs, the bridge of his nose running up the vein that pulses in her neck, his every exhale a breeze, a tremble. "I'm a fast learner."

She can't help the little moan that escapes her, even through closed lips; knows that he's too close now to have missed it.

"I'll umm," he starts to lose his train of thought, she can hear it in the way his tone shifts, the way his fingers stroke just at her neckline; respectful or teasing, she can't tell between the two. "I'll come into the office tomorrow. See what I can do to help clear off your plate."

She shudders, says nothing, the tremor shaking her more than she wants to admit, wants to betray; she's sure he feels it, every tiny shake. "Might as well get used to it, right?" he more mouths, hums than speaks as his lips graze her throat; "If I'm going to be the boss again."

"Right," she whispers, the sound strangled, breathy -- she can feel the heat building in her like fire in her veins, and she almost lets it take her, consume her judgement as her lungs stutter and her chest heaves, desperate; his open mouth against the crease of her neck, only just ghosting there, the perfect tease of pressure, of a kiss. The moments stretch, fit to breaking, and she's a little surprised he doesn't take the initiative, doesn't force her hand as she sits, suspended between what they're becoming and what they could be -- unfocused, pulse like a drum against her ears; boneless and lightheaded and panting behind the clench of her teeth as she tightens the muscles between her thighs.

"I'm hungry," she gasps, stills, eyes wide with something caught, frantic between lust and fear and the unnamable things she can't, won't yet define; she doesn't even realize that she spoke, at first, until it's too late to take it back.

Which, given the way her heart's racing, and the way the center of her thrums hot with the beat -- and he'd only been _touching_ her, mostly through her _clothes_ -- is probably for the best.

He freezes, motionless, and everything that was only just searing feels suddenly and wickedly cold in the space where he says nothing; _does_ nothing. "Famished," he finally croaks, voice off half-an-octave, cracking at the base. "Right."

As soon as he's standing, grabbing for the neglected bag of carryout, Pepper allows herself the breath she needs: deep and soothing, held long and sore in her lungs until the battering of her heart starts to calm against her ribs. Her cheeks are still warm -- still red, she's sure -- when he returns with utensils but no plates, but she's feeling more centered now; more in control.

He hands her the container with her curry, pops open his own, and he gives her a tight smile as he does; she tries not to fret over what the tightness means -- whether it's a good thing or a bad thing -- as quiet fills the room, dotted only by the scrape of forks against plastic, and the slosh of water in its bottle after they take a drink.

"So what exactly does it mean," Tony finally breaks the silence between a mouthful of his Pad Thai, a bean sprout caught between his lips before he swallows; "if I'm taking my job back?"

Pepper shoots him a sidelong glance, tries to read the thoughtful, considering set of his features, the particularly noticeable bob of his Adam's apple when he swallows. "I don't know what that means."

"No, I mean," and he shovels a bite quick in between one half of his thought and the next, the first words muffled with it as he picks back up; "will you be returning to your former glory as the best PA money can't buy?"

She chews her own mouthful longer than necessary, pondering her answer. "I..." she balks quickly, covers by reaching for her bottle of Fiji and taking a long drink. "I don't know."

His forkful of noodles-and-shrimp pauses halfway to his mouth, half-lost once he finally takes his bite, and Pepper feels, as often she does, like they're on the brink of something; but for the first time, she feels as if they're moving -- running, prepping for the leap -- versus merely standing still.

"This tastes weird." Her thoughts clear as Tony frowns down at his meal, eyes accusing, as if the dish being unsatisfactory were a personal affront on his character. She rolls her eyes fondly at his reaction just as his gaze flickers up to take her in.

"No seriously, try it," he mistakes the twist of her features disbelief, raising up on his knees and maneuvering himself in her direction until he's kneeling next to her, one hand holding a forkful of his food, the other cupped beneath to catch any spillage.

"Try it," he urges, leaning forward, the outside of his little finger almost flush against her lip; "come on."

She opens her mouth just as he moves to poke playfully, impatiently at the line between her top and bottom lips, giving her more of a mouthful than she's ready for; she splutters a little, bits of what didn't quite fit into the bite dripping, undignified, down toward her chin.

He doesn't bother with the napkin only half-a-reach away; he uses the pad of his thumb to clean her mess, sucking the sauce from the edge of his nail and watching her with eyes too dark, too... _much_.

"S'weird, right?" he whispers, breathes; she can taste his food on her tongue, taste _him_ in the air that she inhales, so close.

"No-" she starts, but that's all she gets, because his lips are on hers again, and she's back on a rooftop with the world burning and spinning and dying and _living_ all around her, under her, _within_ her, and this time it only takes an instant before she's kissing him back, her lips swollen quickly with arousal and fervor, tender and plump as he dips his tongue between them and runs, questing, across her teeth. It's quick, and searing, and it steals her breath, but it's over too soon, though it's probably for the better -- she's already reeling.

For a moment, all she does is focus on the rise and fall of her own chest; and then upon the fluctuation of the light she can see, if she looks hard enough, at the center of Tony's chest beneath his shirt: it surges between his breaths, glows hard when he breathes in, abates on the exhale. It's fascinating, and distracts her well enough from the lapse, the time it takes her to regroup.

"No," she finally breathes out, belated -- her eyes unfocused, unseeing where they settle between the discarded lids of their takeout containers, weeping condensation onto the glass. "It's not weird," she says it again, unsure what she's talking about, referring to -- clearing her throat and trying to remember just what the damn Pad Thai _had_ tasted like in the first place, without Tony flavoring the bulk of it -- and she almost laughs aloud at the absurdity that this is twice, now, that she's described his kiss as being less than weird.

"It's okay," she tacks on, as if it's an improvement in description in the slightest; knowing that he understands as well as she does that they're not just commenting on their dinners. She finally looks up at him, catches his eyes through her lashes with a coy curl of her lips; "Good, even."

If he were anyone else, she might have suspected he was blushing; as it happened, the lighting had shifted in the room to accommodate the setting sun, and she was fairly certain that _it_ was to blame for the subtle flush that took his cheeks. "Huh," he says thoughtfully, staring at her for a long moment, never breaking eye contact as he takes his fork in hand and twirls another bite around the prongs; "must have just been me."

She lets quiet contentment settle between them, takes another few bites of her own meal before she realizes that she much preferred his taste in her mouth to the taste of her curry.

"I'm starting to think you only do that to keep me from contradicting you," she tosses out, tests the waters, and he doesn't even pretend not to know what she's talking about; he doesn't meet her eyes, as he pinches a shrimp between his fingers and pops it into his mouth -- just smiles, and it's all the reply, all the reassurance she needs.

"You have to admit," he says, voice full and warm and affectionate, and it's strange, because it doesn't sound odd, doesn't sound new; "it's highly effective." And he kisses her again, hard and full and flush against him; she wants to say it's only to prove his point, but it feels like more.

So much more.


	3. Conversation Three: An Element of Depth

**Title:** Thirteen Conversations (About One Thing)

**Rating:** PG -13

**Disclaimer:** Everything you recognize from any other source either doesn't belong to me or is a purely coincidental occurrence. Anything that you've never seen likely belongs to me. I write for enjoyment and no copyright infringement is intended. Title belongs to Karen and Jill Sprecher, from the film of the same name.

**Author's Notes: **Complete and utter teeth-rotting fluff-and-angst. For serious. Broody, mawkish angst, and fluffy, fluffy UST. Well, not really _just_ that, because it's definitely a conversation I wanted them to have, and admittedly, the original plan for this conversation involved _more _angst, but I pushed that back a bit because A) it didn't flow well, and B) I'm in the mood for a bit fluff. The tone is a little different this time around, as is the style - though only slightly - and it mostly stems from the fact that it was written in a number of places, in a number of mindsets, and I liked what they all brought to it, so I tried to knit them together versus trying to homogenize them (that also offers my excuse for the wait - I've been in and out of town, of late).

In any case, nothing really _new_ gets established here, more things just get a bit more grounded, fill out a bit, and the whole to-do _does_ roll around in fluffy, semi-steamy dancing-around-one-another interaction, and that's always a fun thing, right? Maybe?

* * *

**Thirteen Conversations (About One Thing)**

_Conversation Three: An Element of Depth_

By rights, it's not her responsibility to take care of these sorts of affairs anymore: to make certain that Mr. Stark makes his flight to Asia on time; she's still the CEO, after all, and she could have easily sent any one of her own assistants to collect the man and get him on his way. Granted, it may have taken a number of them to manage it, and only then after considerable effort - and he probably wouldn't have gotten on his way until the conference had already adjourned - but the fact remained: her job description no longer included babysitting Anthony Edward Stark.

Nevertheless, she's fairly certain that it _is_ her responsibility to take care of _Tony_; and really, it had been for longer than she can clearly recall, now, even before they'd taken up this... whatever this was they were doing - she doesn't like to put a name to it, for fear of dubbing it something more than it is, giving it more weight, more substance than she's prepared to be mistaken about - and so, even though she hasn't talked to him about resuming her position as his PA, it's _her_ heels that click on the steps, _her_ hands that clutch his portfolio as she runs through the highlights in her head, the bullet-points he needs to know before he hits the tarmac.

The bass of his music thumps, vibrates in her chest, plays against her pulse as she keys in her pass-code, the noise assaulting her for the first moment, sore in her ears before she cuts the feed with a press of her fingertip. Lips pursed, she waits a moment, protracted and lingering, until the last echoes of cacophony fade, her steps the only sound that breaks the soft hiss-and-clank of metal and heat coming from his central workstation.

He looks up before she stops, watches her walk for the last few paces; and he's never done that before - she knows it in the way her lungs seem to tighten for an instant, caught between breaths in the permeating smog of sweat and exhaust; creation and chaos and... Tony.

Just Tony, really.

"You're going to go deaf, you know," she comments idly, doing her best not to stare at the smears of grease, the slick of oily residue on his bare skin - at the creases of his knuckles and the edges of his wife-beater; tries not to imagine inching the fabric away, sucking his fingers into her mouth between a moan.

He chuckles, and she grins despite herself; the sound is light - out of place here, in the aftermath of raucous metal - and it diffuses the weight, the heat of the moment gathering in her mind. "Least of my worries, Pep."

His fingertips pinch at something she can't see over the sprawl of parts and pieces littering his worktable, and he squints his eyes, crinkling them at the corners, and she notices - suddenly - the difference between the way the folds of skin align when he's concentrating, as opposed to when he laughs.

She moves to begin speaking, inhaling sharp and swift in preparation for the brief she'll have to deliver in under a minute if she plans on keeping his ever-wandering attention; she's out of practice, even after only a few weeks, and it feels a little daunting, slipping back into this role - anticipating, knowing the rhythm of Tony's very being well enough to remain one step ahead of him at all times.

But it's also easier now, somehow; it feels a little like coming home.

His gaze shifts suddenly, breaks from the mess of wires and gears in the gap where he's removed the casing from a long arch of bowed metal, coats of chafed and gouged red dulled and scratched, just inside the open circlet cut for his reactor. She imagines that it's essential work, things that have to connect and conduct just so, and if his eyes hadn't been on her, weren't locked with her own as his lips part to speak, she may have felt a pang at the thought, the way it hits too close to home that he's tinkering now, not with weapons or toys, but with the technology that keeps him going, keeps him functioning from day to day. Keeps his chest heaving, his blood pumping, his heart beating.

Keeps him _alive_.

She's not sure she'll ever _really_ get used to that.

A sound crashes from behind him, across the way near one of the numerous wet bars installed in various corners on this floor of the house, and the subsequent shatter of glass, muffled by whatever it might have been holding, cuts them both off.

"_Jesus_," he huffs, almost growls under his breath, fingers tracing his hairline in frustration and streaking black across the skin at his temple as he turns from her, stalking toward the source of the commotion; she should know better by now, really, but she follows - curiosity, much as it had often led to more trouble than it warranted with him, had never been a habit she'd managed to shake.

She rounds the corner - dodges one of the countless piles of shattered partitions, crumbled concrete and drywall swept, clumped into heaps resembling order, rendering his work area even more of a maze than usual as she tries to keep her heel out of the dust sent billowing from a mallet or a jackhammer - in time to catch his palm cupped roughly around the neck-like stretch of the robotic assistant he'd apparently set about the task of preparing his drink. She stifles a laugh as he gestures between the floor and the countertop, following the puddles of spillage that dot from the blender to the mound of broken glass and the clumped, oddly-colored soup-like beverage that marks the scene of the crime.

"You know," Tony laments as he leans into the bot, lowering his voice with a hint of a sneer; "naming you Dummy may have, in retrospect, been giving you too much credit."

It never fails to amaze her, even after all this time, just how lifelike he could make a machine, how expressive those metallic cylinders and and hard lines could be when bowed in shame just so. She lets her mind trail back to her first few weeks with him, watching the boxy sort of robotics he'd toyed with - cutting edge for its time - and smirks a little at the progress.

"It's a drink," Tony continues to disparage the robot, causing the impossible arch of its framework to sharpen, deepen. "One. Drink. All I ask if that you don't spill the whole thing before I can actually ingest it."

"Have I given you reason to fail at such rudimentary tasks? Have I offended you somehow?" he asks rhetorically, though poor Dummy buzzes mournfully enough to draw a sympathetic frown from her at the verbal barrage. "Have I treated you as something less than what you are? Because quite frankly, what you are, what you literally _are_, is scrap metal."

The machine nearly skims the floor with how low it's sunk, whirring and humming pathetically as Tony nudges his toe disparagingly at the base of the robot. "Yeah, you're lucky I don't put you out with the trash on..." he pauses thoughtfully, before wrapping up weakly with a nondescript, "on trash day."

"Tuesday," Pepper offers, because _he_ certainly wouldn't know.

"Exactly," he nods at her, turning quickly back to the bot with renewed tenacity; "Tuesday. With the trash." He steps carefully around the broken glass, retrieving another from the cabinet and pouring what's left in the blender until it fills just below the brim. "Clean this up," he gestures idly as he takes a drink, a subtle film of chartreuse clinging above his lip; "think you can manage that?"

The tip of his tongue sneaks out from between his lips after he lifts the glass to his mouth again, cleaning off the residue, and it's only then that the incongruence, the abnormality dawns on her, hard and fast - a bolt of lightning, practically, for the way it singes, strikes fear through her very core.

"Tony, what's..." she starts, cautious, fighting not to jump to any conclusions; because he _hates_ that "green gobbledegook," as he'd so eloquently termed it when she'd been on a juicing kick in '04, and she'd only managed to convince him to try it again - long after she herself had lost the taste for it - when he'd been having trouble getting back on his feet after he'd gotten back from Afghanistan, after...

He only drank _that_ when he was hurting - and now, apparently, when he was _dying_. And he hadn't been out in the suit since Flushing Meadows.

"Tony," she exhales, a sharp pain seizing in the center of her chest as every manner of devastating revelation flashes through her mind; more things he's kept from her, more lies between them - more obvious pains she's left him to shoulder alone.

"Pepper," and there's a part of her that catches the teasing edge that coats the tail-end of her name - that name _he'd_ given her, that had stuck; fit better, now, than her own, it seemed - but it can't outweigh the sudden, stinging worry.

"You said that," she forces past the lump in her throat, the pulse pounding there, a little breathless; "you said... you're okay." She says it quickly, flatly - fact. Incontrovertible _fact_.

She's not willingly to accept anything less.

"You're okay, so why are you," she stares at him, at the drink, and what she thinks it means - what it can't mean, can't but _has_ to mean, because, _because_...

Tony, on the other hand, is staring at her as if she may have unwittingly grown an extra head. "Of course I'm... oh." He must catch the way she's staring at him, at the glass in his hand or at the barely-visible pink above his neckline, healing remnants under the skin. "Oh, that," he adds, a little dumbly, his free hand rubbing against the back of his neck, and she doesn't miss how his fingers finds the bruises, the echoes of the marks.

"It's fine," he says quickly, eyes wide enough that she can't doubt his honesty; the look in his eyes that she's grown to know, that had once told her he didn't have anyone else, that had asked her inn passing whether she often thought about that night on the roof.

The look that had been too clouded to be true when he'd told her he simply didn't want to go home. At all.

"_I'm_ fine," he continues, leaning his weight at the hip against the countertop, lifting his glass but pausing again, hovering just before his lips make contact: "I mean, fine being a vague, amorphous sort of descriptor, but I'm not, you know, dying," he rambles, narrowing his eyes at her with something between supposition and concern; "if that's what you're worried about."

She sees it in his face as it dawns on him that that's _exactly_ what she was worried about; he heaves a sigh as he sets the drink down and locks his gaze inside of hers for the longest stretch of seconds; reassuring. Present.

"Seriously," he reiterates, finally; "Just... habit really, shocking as that might seem. Plus, it _is_ good for you," he inclines his head toward the glass before turning awkwardly toward the upright cooler at his back. "And you're the one always telling me I need more green in my diet, so, yeah."

He tosses her a bottle of Perrier, as if that closes the matter - and maybe it can, though she doubts it. He doesn't even wait to see if she catches it; she does, hands clasped tight around the glass, slipping against the condensation just as the cooler door sucks shut. "Cheers."

She opens the bottle, ignores the way he toasts the air in her direction with his verdant shake; takes a deep breath, and feels exhausted for a long moment, the tension shucking off of her, but not without consequence.

"What are you working on?" she asks between sips as she recovers, to distract herself, maybe. She follows him around a random, still-standing section of his particle accelerator, the humidity produced by whatever he's been tinkering with pulling at the messy bun twisted up against the back of her head, loosing stray strands against the nape of her neck.

"Just a few adjustments to the suit, for the new reactor." She takes in the sprawl of metal and wires, less-than-recognizable as his full suit where it lies in layers and pieces. There'd been a time when it had unnerved her, the spectacle of him beneath the alloy, behind the mask, but now, the dissembled mess of his protection laid in front of her is almost more disturbing, more unsettling than the idea of him safe under its weight.

"Figured if I was going to go ahead and make the repairs, I might as well stick a few upgrades in while I was at it." He walks around the workbench, eyeing up the nondescript slabs of tech and steel with a practiced gaze, noting things she can't even begin to fathom in the melee.

"Care to join me for a test run?" he asks, nonchalant, as he removes his shirt in one clean motion, tossing it across what she thinks might be some component of his propulsion system, maybe; she honestly can't quite tell - isn't paying the idea much attention, really, as she tries her very best not to stare openly at his naked flesh: the golden skin, the definition beneath, the slow dusting of curls that lead below the fly of his jeans, drawn down from his navel.

"What..." she splutters a little, the last swallow of her water still moist against her lips; "You mean," she gestures, a bit lost, between the armor and the ceiling; iron, metal, flying, _me_ - her hands as much of a jumble as her thoughts as she gapes a little at the mere _prospect_ of it.

And it's too bad - her mind whispers traitorously, _impossibly_ - that he'd have to whisk her about the skies with all that metal in between them; she almost dares to wonder whether he could do it without a shirt on.

"Just a spin around the block," he shrugs as he rubs his palms against the thighs of his jeans, as if it's nothing - commonplace, to offer a flight down the coast on a unspectacular Wednesday morning.

"I refuse to _drive_ with you," she starts, tone incredulous as her eyes fix upon the sky outside, glazed through the windows, and she tries not to imagine the rustle of the breeze in her hair, or how the hard wrap of his hold around her middle would feel a few hundred feet above the ground.

"Which is something we're going to have to work on, you do realize," he interjects, the careful scrape of a long, trapezoidal piece of half-assembled armor against the worktop surface echoing around his voice as he lifts it; holds it out in front of him with a critical eye.

"What on _earth_ makes you think I'd want to _fly_ with you?" she finishes, though the disbelief is tempered as she processes the metal plate he's holding, the tangle of integrating circlets and leads, delicate filaments snaking out along the circumference of the opening meant to attach, to draw in against his chest. She watches the almost prism-like design as the light plays inside the newest model of his reactor implant, framed by the empty space in the armor where he hefts it carefully up to test the fit. And it's funny, really, in a strange sort of way, how her pulse jumps, pounds a little harder when she sees it, when it's visible - it makes her nervous, only not quite; more like anxious, maybe, because her chest tightens and she can't look away: she feels exposed on his behalf, even as he doesn't seem to pay it any mind.

"Well, we wouldn't technically be _on_ earth, would we, because we'd be in the _air_," he points out in that frustratingly endearing way of his, mocking and yet warm, light all at once as he moves to step into the base of his chestpiece. "Semantics, admittedly, but clarity of intention is a virtue, Potts, and-"

"Wait," she interrupts suddenly, and to her surprise he complies, almost automatically- elbows bent, hands stilled with the sheen of newly-molded plating glinting off the lights overhead. He follows her gaze to where it's fixed upon his reactor, glowing between his pecs, half-obscured where he'd been about to attach the plate - she can tell that he suspects, at least, knows what she wants, but he doesn't move to acquiesce on his own: he simply waits, features blank but strong, and watches her: watches as her needs and desires and all the _hows_ and the _whys_ mingle, bleed into one another behind the blue-grey of her stare.

"Can I?" she asks - the question she's wanted to ask for weeks, for _months_ around that tightness in her chest that's more than anxiety or nerves, that feels more like the air being sucked out of a room or breaking the surface of the water after too long of a dive. She knows her eyes are too wide when she looks at him, knows he can read her in the moment - all of the want and the fear in her laid bare for his perusal, his consideration, but he doesn't react to it, doesn't seem to mind; he doesn't even flinch - just puts the armor down and walks toward her, willing; waiting.

She doesn't expect the uncertainty, the nerves that spark in those eyes even as he seems so sure; she doesn't expect his skin to feel so warm, or the metal on her fingertips to be so smooth when she reaches out - quick, before she loses her nerve. His eyes don't quite meet hers, too hooded and downcast to cross her glance, but she can tell they're stormy, conflicted; he's uncomfortable, she can see it, but never once does he waver. He doesn't hide from her.

And _that_; that means more than anything else.

"It's," she starts, trying to break the strained silence that's come upon them as her touch lingers around the reactor, but her heart's too loud, too hard against her ears for the words to take hold; mouth too dry for the syllables to gain purchase on her tongue. He doesn't seem to notice though, not with the way that the heat of his skin brands deep, strong and unforgiving against the pads of her fingers as she traces, lilts against the now-faint grey lines, grids mark etched, flat but still heavy, twisted in his flesh as tight as it settles in her gut. She swallows hard, following them from where they fade into where his biceps press against his side, where his collarbone lines below his neck, wandering inward to the circle of tepid metal just above his heart. She pauses where the trails cut off against the port in his chest, and it's only then that she catches the beat beneath the steel, the way his pulse races under her touch, hard and fast; the way his chest, beneath the lines and the scars, heaves a little too deeply, too quickly - brushes the swell of her breast when she leans too close.

She'd been afraid of it, from the first time she saw it; the skin around the unpolished metal angry and red, the blood so close to the surface under the scarring that it was hard to tell whether the wounds had ever healed, or if they were still gaping, still exposed. And she'd been right to fear it - how many times had it almost killed him, how close had he been to death just weeks ago, just days? - but the glow of it, the subtle thrum of it below her fingertips - so much more constant and unfaltering than the rhythm thudding on beneath; she'd never noticed how beautiful it was, how bright - how it burned not outside of him, separate from himself, but perfectly in tune with him. Maybe it never had, before; or maybe she'd just never noticed.

She doesn't realize that he's moved until his hands cup against her hips, the pads of his thumbs tracing lazy half-moons from the jut of her pelvis to the line of her skirt, fingers splayed through the fabric of her clothes, his broad hands against her stomach. She feels the pace of his heartbeat surge, the throb seeming to hit a little harder, and there's a flash of something singular, something raw and burning in her that she's known forever and yet had always shied from, denied and brushed aside; had never quite paid enough mind to know its strength, its worth.

His touch lingers, drags across the lines of her ribs, skimming her chest beneath her blouse, and she swallows a moan, stiffens silently against a shiver when he pauses, the breath in his lungs stilling for an instant as his fingers dust, catch in the gather of fabric at her breasts and run, a tease, against the hint of a curve pressed in against her arms. The moment stretches longer than she can track, can hold, and all she can taste is the hammer of her pulse in her throat, all she can feel is his touch on her skin and his heart against her touch, the rhythm of it all condensing to a constant, reeling sort of hum.

"You know, it's a shame you don't want to fly with me," he murmurs, his tone husky, breath weighty on her cheek as he pulls her from her musings, as the idle stroke of her touch around the curve of the reactor slows to a stop - just an unguarded, unmasked point of contact, now, meaning everything and nothing; and suddenly, the world goes warm - the air around her, that she breathes, the brush of his skin: all of it filled irrepressibly, _irrevocably_, with _him_. "Being up there," he exhales slowly, "it's..."

His eyes lift past her, through her, before they cross back to center on the features of her face, before he breathes in deep and slides the tip of his nose against the side of hers, his exhalations hot as his lips move, form the syllables close enough to feel, to catch on her skin; "Beautiful."

And the word is more, as he stares it into her, burns it against her eyes into something firmer, deeper; the word means more than cloudscapes and sunrises above sea level.

"Besides," she feels the word as he picks up again, like a purr along his sternum, stuck inside the lines of her palm; "I didn't hear any complaints the last time."

"You were saving me from an explosion," the words come out as half a whisper, but at least they're steady; the only thing about that is, really, as he presses closer, a hairsbreadth between them - his bare chest grazing against her when their ragged breaths align. "And as I recall, I protested enough for you to feel the need to cut me off before I'd finished."

"Hmm," a smile curls across his lips and his eyes narrow deviously; widen with lust and something fathomless that aches in her chest as he leans in and closes the gaps, the reactor catching her hand between them as his breath settles on the dip of her upper lip, his tongue slipping staccato against her mouth with the consonants: "Maybe I should try that again."

And they haven't kissed yet, not like _this_; the way he pulls her into him, the force of it coupled with something tender, betraying the need that crackles, surges between them; a tension unresolved that's finally reached its breaking point - and not merely, she suspects, because they've finally acknowledged what's always been there, what's grown between them, unassumingly, beyond their lines of sight. And so if it feels like less of a choice and more of an imperative, a unquestionable necessity - requisite, if either of them was going to make it out alive; or maybe, instead, if either was going to stay inside of this, together, without falling apart - she's not going to question it, not going to analyze why his lips feel hotter, why she notices the breaks in them, the rough patches when they catch at the corners of her mouth as he delves farther, deeper; as his tongue runs across the roof of her mouth and he drinks her, breathes her in as she lets her bottom teeth graze against his lower lip, his taste heady and full as she presses into him. Her petite hands are nothing to be trifled with as she wraps them around his shoulder blades and crushes him to her, nothing left between them but the wrinkles of her shirt and the heat gathering, condensing on their skin.

She whimpers when he nearly sucks the breath from her as he pushes them into the edge of the worktable, her heels giving her the advantage of the surface hitting just near the top of her thighs; she wants to fall back, to give in to the momentum of the moment, of his gravity and his weight against her, his chest upon her own - she wants it, wants it with everything she is as his fingertips draw against the line of her jaw and he cups her cheek with one hand and her hip with the other, his body fitting between her knees with lazy, instinctual precision. She _wants_ it, but they can't.

They can't right now.

She feels the shift immediately, the way that the buzz, the high around them begins to subside, and she can tell he picks up on it just as quickly - _experienced as he is with these sorts of situations_, she thinks a bit wryly - and the sigh, the gasp that escapes them both when they part feels subtle, ordinary: momentous in a silent way that she doesn't comprehend yet, but knows is something new, something different - something she'd like to understand through experience, familiarity; through knowing it intimately, often enough to recognize it on sight.

His chest veritably shudders as he pushes up and off of her, staggers away a little drunkenly - reluctant, she flatters herself to imagine, only it's not just her imagination; she's pretty sure it's true. She's no stranger to the look in his eyes, and she's pretty certain she knows what it means; knows, because it tingles in the pit of her stomach and sends heat pulsing through her veins anew, leaves the unresolved tightness in her writhing, aching all over again, the taste of him like a drug on her tastebuds, burning like fire with every slowing - racing, slowing, _racing_ - throb of her heart.

She sucks a steadying breath in, cold and thick through her teeth, and she does her best to calm everything in her, to let it go for the time being on the promise that they'll be back here again, and soon; with the careful run of her tongue across her gums to replace the frantic exploration of his own, she steers them away from the precipice.

For now.

"You've been drinking _that_?" she says with a smile, smacking the words against the backs of her teeth, the grainy texture of proteins, of fibers there likely imagined out of necessity; to distract from the overwhelming tang of _him_ beneath the fleeting impressions of green, and she tries to focus on the sensations beyond the heat in her stomach, the thump of her pulse - the tension between her legs.

And he takes pause, if only for an instant, processing the absurdity, the change in tone and intent for just a moment before he laughs; _really_ laughs - in a way she's rarely seen him do it; his shoulders shake and his eyes squint and his cheeks grow ruddy with the effort of amusement, and she feels everything else melt slowly, impossibly, blissfully and tortuously _away_; wonders if this is what he looked like before the world came crashing down around him, or if it's something new entirely. "Not that I had much of a choice in the matter," he retorts with a wry sort of mirth; "but you get used to it, actually. S'an acquired taste."

"Hmmm," she moans, keens, and they're still close enough that he can hear the undertones, the meaning in it; and she can't deny it's gratifying when she notices the way he clenches his jaw as it echoes.

"Wonderful as this distraction's been, Tony," she purrs through a smile, infusing just the slightest edge of authority in the sound; "you're late for a flight to Hong Kong."

And certainly, it kills the mood on the surface; but they've started something, here - taken a step that can't be unmade, and she knows that however long it takes to get back to that place, it will be waiting for them.

She sees it in his eyes, in her eyes reflected back in his; they've jumped ship, passed the brink. They can't avoid it forever.

And besides: the way his lips part as he pants, catches his breath again; the way her sight seems a little brighter, a little hazy - the way they're both still breathing each other's air - she's pretty sure that means avoiding this is no longer a priority for either one of them.

And she's more than 'pretty sure' that she's okay with that fact.

Tony takes a moment to adjust, as if walking from the darkness out into the sun: he blinks once, twice - seeming to erase whatever visions he'd been forming behind his eyes with the motion, putting them away for safekeeping, a later date - before he, too, lets it go with an exaggerated sigh.

"You know," he says, finally, his tone tinged with a whine; "there was this moment, a very brief moment, mind you, in which I imagined that we had gotten past the point of haranguing."

And it's kind of uncanny, how quickly it happens, how that word washes away the last vestiges of the humming contentment, the vibrating high of the taste of him on her lips; how it darkens the edges of her perception with something sinister, churns in her stomach like foreboding mixed with loss, and - worse still - the false hope of the impossible coming true, just because her heart was breaking, and he was gone, and she didn't know how to survive in the wake of the pieces left behind.

She barely hears the rest of his good-humored ramble; not that she needs to, she knows it by heart: "You've no idea how disappointing it is to find that I was, in fact, mistaken." She doesn't quite process the way he strides to the sink and washes from the elbows down without her instruction, or how he spits orders at Jarvis and the bots like clockwork, a well-oiled routine of encrypting files and safeguarding works-in-progress that should probably impress her, really, except that she's still lost, swimming in the memories she thought she'd gotten over, thought she'd left behind.

Memories she thought she'd laid to rest, until she learned she'd almost lost him again.

"I know I've pointed this out to you before," he tosses over his shoulder, even as he dries his skin and shrugs on a clean shirt without his usual degree of petulance; "but somehow, having my own plane makes me significantly disinclined to care so much about being on time."

And of course he's said it before; of _course_ he _has_, and the smirk on his mouth, the glint in his eyes as he turns and winks at her does nothing to keep the memories of that day - that horrible day that had plagued her dreams for so long, too long - the day she was born twisted from a day of celebration into three _months'_ worth of mourning. She remembers the details with despicable clarity: the high neck of the shirt he'd been wearing, the way he shrugged on his jacket and slid into the Audi and unfolded his sunglasses with one foot flat against the cement floor, hung across the threshold between the doorjambs, the other hovering already above the gas pedal. She remembers the way he'd slipped his shades over his eyes, and she remembers how she'd missed their color underneath the tinge of red - everything rose-colored, because Tony Stark lived a fantasy, except he didn't, not that day.

Except; maybe he did. Maybe he did, because he'd come back. Against all odds, he'd somehow managed to come back.

And there's nothing in the world she's more grateful for than that.

She bites her lips against the urge to say something, or maybe to sob - she hadn't given these shadows enough credit, apparently, for how easily they take her over, even now - and she realizes in that moment - unexpectedly, unsurprisingly - that she can't let him go, let him leave; not after she'd felt him pressed against her like that, watched the way his eyes had darkened with need and lust and unspeakable things, not when his flavor still outweighed her own in her mouth: beyond all likelihood and logic, she couldn't, _wouldn't_ watch him walk away like that again.

Not today.

"I'd," she coughs into her hand, and it draws his attention for the last half of a second, his eyes meeting hers above the lip of his glass as he drains the last of his chlorophyl cocktail; "I'll be accompanying you, actually."

His faces sours as he swallows the dregs too quick, his response delayed as he clicks his tongue reflexively against the roof of his mouth to temper down the taste. "You're what?"

"I'm coming with you," she says, this time considerably more confident, as if the first time she'd just been practicing, and he'd merely been distracted enough to think she'd been unsure.

"Why?" His eyes narrow; he'd noticed, and she can't help but be a little bit flattered - a little bit perturbed that he'd picked _now_ to heed the little fluctuations in her voice, _now_ to figure out what they may or may not mean.

"I have to meet with someone." And her jaw tightens, her chin tipped up a bit so that the point of her nose goes a little bit higher, her eyes heavily-lidded as she stares him down with an authority she can own even as she improvises - because maybe it hadn't worked out this time around, but she really did have the makings, the _bearing_ of an chief executive officer.

"Someone?" he counters skeptically, eyebrow quirked just so, head cocked with the question of it - she's usually so much more precise.

She clarifies, blinking too quickly as she doubles back mentally: "Director Leung." She pictures the tall-yet-shorter-than-her-in-heels man in his early thirties, with his prematurely-thinning hair and his careful expressions. She averts her eyes by grabbing at the portfolio she'd set on the counter and shuffling through the various paperwork stuffed within - she may be able to fool the corporate world, but he _knows_ her, and will be able to call her bluff if she gives him an in: even a playboy picks things up over the course of a decade.

"He and I have a few things to iron out regarding the particulars of the agreement before I'm officially ousted from my position," she adds, in an attempt to solidify her argument.

"You're the one who wanted out," he reminds her pointedly before backtracking to address the matter at hand; "I thought that was the whole reason _I_ was going."

"Two heads are better than one, Tony," she counters, adopting a non-nonsense sort of air as she schools her expression and closes the portfolio with a forceful, final snap. "And admittedly, while I'm not expecting them to be experts on the matter, _I_ certainly don't know even the first thing about how the arc reactor works,"

"That's a lie," he cuts her off without remorse, his eyes bright when he turns them on her.

"What?"

"You probably know more than most of the people who worked around that thing every day," he tells her, crossing his arms carefully over his chest as he considers her with more intensity that she thinks the exchange actually deserves. "You popped one out of my chest, and snapped another one back in."

"After nearly killing you," she quips sharply, as if it's so small a matter in the grand scheme of things that it actually _requires_ reminding.

As if sometimes, her nightmares don't show her what may have happened, had there been no '_nearly_.'

"Details," he waves her off as he grabs for his jacket, slips his arms into the sleeves, stretching the cotton across his chest taut, tempting, only she doesn't think he knows it, doesn't think she teases her on purpose.

_This_ time.

"You know how to access the fail-safe mechanism to overload the reactor core. I think like, maybe, twelve people in the world know how to initiate that protocol."

She wills her mind not to go there, not _again_.

"You know that they're important enough not to get rid of," he says softly, his voice taking on a strange quality she doesn't recognize - not in him, at least - as his fingers press along the jut of the reactor where it shines through his shirt, a gentle smile curling the corners of his mouth with a sort of a melancholy nostalgia that she can't read, can't know if it's good or it's bad.

He steps toward her, then, and gathers her hands in his own - leaves the space between them to yawn, but when runs the pads of his thumbs across her knuckles, it's oddly, intensely, _wonderfully_ intimate, just standing there with him.

"You know lots of things," he murmurs, the sadness in his smile giving way to something almost shy, and somehow - and she's not at all sure as to why - but _somehow_, that's the most glowing compliment he's ever paid her.

When he lets go, it takes a moment before she can focus on anything but the fact that she misses the feel of his fingers around hers.

"Shall we then?" She blinks, and he's already walking; he stops when the echo of her heels doesn't follow, spinning on his the balls of his feet and backing away at half the pace, smirking as he reads the mild confusion in her face. "Me. You. China. Wasn't that the plan?" He turns again, on the trust that she'll follow this time.

And she does, of course; but her eyes linger on the workbench for a moment, the still-wet basin of the sink, water droplets clinging to the sides, and it's only then she sees it, unimposing, quiet in the corner.

He's rehung the Barnett Newman she loves so much.

She knows he doesn't understand why it's her favorite, but that's not what matters. What matters is that it's still there, and what's more: there's no trace of Shepard Fairey to be seen.

With a grin, she follows him to his newly-returned car collection, hoping he chooses something that doesn't exceed a maximum of one-hundred-and-sixty miles an hour.

Then again, she's not sure he owns very much that fits that description.

The flight seems longer than it should be, though she manages to catch a quick nap along the way; and if it just so happens that said nap takes place upon the chaise that Tony'd somehow managed to squeeze along side of her on, her head tucked beneath his chin and his arm draped lazily around her waist - well, _she's_ certainly not complaining.

When they land, just before they disembark, he slips an arm around her hips, presses the silhouette of her against his side and breathes her in from the crook of her neck to the curl of her hair, his lashes tickling her jawline, the skin just below her ear as his eyes slide close. He exhales against her - heavy, full - his lips firm yet yielding when he presses them to her cheek like a promise of something better, something more before the sun breaks through the open door and they have to pull away.

He slips the last button of his jacket into its hole with deft fingers as they alight on foreign soil, his hand outstretched and his smile soft but genuine as he greets the waiting executives and the smattering of dignitaries they've toted along to impress the infamous Mr. Stark. He takes it all in stride, of course: his Chinese stilted but accurate until they transition naturally into English after pleasantries are exchanged. She almost holds back behind him, slipping into the role of the assistant - after all, she reminds herself, she's not here as the exiting CEO of Stark International, and even in the short span where she _had_ been in charge, she hadn't had the opportunity for face-to-face interaction like this - but before she can process the habit, his hand brushes at her waist, bringing her up alongside of him: nothing untoward, or suggestive of anything than the fact that they're equals, partners.

As she inquires after the Chairman's son, who she remembers had just joined the PLA when they'd last been in Hong Kong, she hears Tony inquiring after the negotiations headed up by Director Leung; who, Tony says, he recalls has been in Kuwait for the past three weeks, and wouldn't be returning for another four.

And she knows she's been found out; had never fooled him at all, in fact. She doesn't delude herself into thinking that he'd misinterpreted her intentions, her need to come along; she does, however, wonder why he allowed it, why he didn't put up a fight.

She ducks her head as she feels a blush creep up her neck, hoping that she can pass it off on the heat; but she catches his eye as she averts her own, and the smile he flashes her as they walk together after making their greetings is brilliant, catches against the sun, and there's something there, now - an understanding, maybe, an appreciation; but Pepper likes to think that maybe it's an element of depth, a sense of affection or care.

But something's there, alright; and whatever it is, she likes it.


End file.
